"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

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Sunday, April 23, 2017

Coming Up for Air

The point of waterboarding someone is to simulate the feeling of drowning, of going under, to induce a state of panic and surrender. The problem with using that as a method of eliciting useful information is that a person in a state of existential panic will say whatever you want them to, just to get it to stop.

In the nearly two years since El Caudillo HRH Fuckface Von Clownstick descended his golden escalator in front of a bunch of chumps who got stiffed on the fifty bucks they were promised, it's safe to say that most Americans have thought about this pathetic asshole on a daily basis, sometimes many times a day. This has left us collectively traumatized, willing to say or do anything to make it stop and return to sanity. It has also left us with several inescapable conclusions:

Clownstick sucks. Mendacious, corrupt, and deeply stupid. No redeeming features whatsoever. I mean, I despised Dubya and Cheney, but Dubya is at least fairly amiable and sincerely loves his family, and Cheney is legitimately intelligent and can articulate his train of thought, as demented as it may be. But FVC is simply an awful human being. He's going to fuck up bigly, it's going to cost a lot of lives and money, and he doesn't care one bit, as long as he and his shitbird family can loot and profiteer.

The media, in the aggregate, are absolutely fucking terrible. Seriously, how the fuck is this a "transcript"? It's so heavily redacted and rambling it makes even less sense than a full transcript would have. And what the hell is this, this decontextualized boilerplate? It's this sort of lazy, enabling bullshit that made it possible for this wretched clown to stay in the ring long enough to do some real damage. Thanks forever, you assholes.

The American people have enabled all of this. We are complicit. We are terrible as well. Half the voters use "make librul snowflakes cry" as their rationale for self-destruction; they seem quite literally to be more than willing to wreck the country if it screws over the right people along the way. They'll burn their own house down if it takes out their neighbor's house as well. Awesome. They deserve to have him welsh on his "contract" with them, just as he has done with every other contract in his miserable existence. The other half is starting to get the message, but still needs to realize that all the protests and marches and complaints to the Office of Government Ethics are meaningless if you don't get enough of them at the ballot box to put their candidates in office.

The thing is, none of have any control over people -- voters and politicians alike -- being stupid or corrupt. Somehow, the king of internet trolls got in, because we all forgot the golden rule of trolls, and we fed him, and keep feeding him. A doddering, senescent, declining, incompetent empire selected someone who has all of those characteristics in spades. He's an ideal reflection of what this nation has become and is still slouching into, and as such will accelerate its collective transition. Rather than obsessively commenting on the dumpster fire by the hour, it might be a good idea to start figuring out how to build that life raft, or at least just live a life outside the thunderdome.

So I think The Ornamental Hermit has the right idea here, one I've been thinking about for quite some time as well. I've got other projects and opportunities that need time and attention, and I'm tired of handing those precious commodities over to this greasy, useless cocksucker-in-charge, for nothing in return except more grief and stress.

I can't promise a Clownstick-free zone; the outrages pile up relentlessly, and get worse all the time, and some of them do demand attention, scrutiny, discussion. We haven't heard much about Russia lately, mostly because Congress has been on vacation [Ed. -- from what?], but it's about to break again, bigly. We might squeak out of this yet, if he can be neutralized by scandal, if arrogance and incompetence do their thing, if enough people get off their lazy asses and vote without expecting some kind of fucking reward for being a responsible citizen.

But we all have to get back to living our lives, and stop giving this soulless vampire and his cult of morons things they do not deserve. Let them live with his lies and broken contracts, and let them choke on the consequences. If we could send Clownstick on a rocket to the moon with Mark Burnett and Jeff Zucker, the world would be a much better place instantaneously. Until that frabjous day, maybe we need to just boycott them all as much as possible.